Science and technology in Venezuela
Open-knowledge reference entry
Science and technology in Venezuela includes research based on exploring Venezuela's diverse ecology and the lives of its indigenous peoples.
Under the Spanish rule, the monarchy made very little effort to promote education in the American colonies and in particular in those in which they had less commercial interest, as in Venezuela. The country only had its first university some two hundred years later than Mexico, Colombia or Panama.
The first studies on the native languages of Venezuela and the indigenous customs were made in the middle of the XVIII century by the Catholic missionaries. The Jesuits Joseph Gumilla and Filippo Salvatore Gilii were the first to theorize about linguistic relations and propose possible language families for the Orinoco river basin. The Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling, one of the 12 Apostles of Carl Linnaeus, classificated for the first time the exuberant tropical flora of the Orinoco river basin.
Other naturalists in the last decade of the siecle were Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Alexander Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland.
In the nineteenth century, several scientists visited Venezuela such as Francisco Javier de Balmis, Agostino Codazzi, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustáriz, Jean Joseph D'Auxion de La Vayesse, François de Pons, José Salvany, Auguste Sallé, Robert Hermann Schomburgk, Wilhelm Sievers, Carl Ferdinand Appun, Custav Karsten, Adolf Ernst, Édouard André, Benedikt Roezl, Karl Moritz, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Anton Goering, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, Augustus Fendler, Federico Johow, Charles Waterton, Alfred Russel Wallace, Everard im Thurn, François Désiré Roulin, Henry Whitely, Jean Chaffanjon, Frank M. Chapman, Émile-Arthur Thouar, Jules Crevaux and many others, some of whom are buried in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) founded on February 9, 1959, by government decree, has its origins in the Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research (IVNIC) which Dr. Humberto Fernandez Moran founded in 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Science and technology in Venezuela” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.